Moby-Dick

The try-works

Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly
distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of
the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting
the completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln
were transported to her planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the
most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar
strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of
brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in
height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry
is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing
it on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks
it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large,
sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great
try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels’ capacity.
When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are
polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like
silver punchbowls. During the night-watches some cynical old
sailors will crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a
nap. While employed in polishing them—one man in each pot, side by
side— many confidential communications are carried on, over the
iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation.
It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone
diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by
the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the
cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in
precisely the same time.

Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the
bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron
mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths
are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire
is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a
shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of
the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept
replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no
external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall. And here
let us go back for a moment.

It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works
were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to
oversee the business.

“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire
the works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.
Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the
try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is
used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a
word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now
called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its
unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a
plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to
inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must
live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor
about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It
smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument
for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from
the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild
ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the
fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty
flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the
famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly
commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and
sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from
their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore
down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in
conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a
wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean
shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers.
With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into
the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky
flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.
The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship
there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to
leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the
further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This
served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise
employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes
felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the
contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As
they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of
terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked
upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and
fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their
huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea
leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot
her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and
the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and
viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse,
and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material
counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours
silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for
that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the
redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual
sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and
half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so
soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which
ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since
inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing
sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The
jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears
was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I
thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my
fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further
apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to
steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching
the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing
seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by
flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever
swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven
ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered
feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped
the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was,
somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the
matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned
myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to
her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time
to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very
probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from
this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal
contingency of being brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream
with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept
the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial
fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in
the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like
devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at
least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only
true lamp—all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor
Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of
miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not
the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two
thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more
of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true,
or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the
Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and
Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.”
ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s
wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast
crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell;
calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men;
and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing
wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on
tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably
wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the
way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the
congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest
it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a
wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there
is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the
blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in
the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge,
that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop
the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain,
even though they soar.

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